In some mobile electronic devices, content providers are the only way to share data between applications because the electronic devices do not include a common storage area that all applications may access. A content provider acts like a gateway/interface of a hosting application, allowing a third party application to gain access to the hosting application's data. Accordingly, content providers allow data associated with one application (a hosting application) to be accessed by other applications (requesting applications). A number of content providers may exist for storing and retrieving common data types, such as audio, video, images and personal contact information.
The content providers may be queried (requested) for the data they contain. The data that the content providers provide, responsive to the request, may be stored at a server in a network. A user of an electronic device may wish to keep some of this data associated with the hosting application private. Accordingly, the user may not want to permit a requesting application of the electronic device access to a portion of the data of the hosting application.
This document describes methods and systems that are directed to solving at least some of the problems described above.